Il Duce’s Portraits

PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s childhood memories of Mussolini and fascist propaganda... Writer tries to "chart a history of the evolution of Mussolini’s image through his official portraits as they have remained in my memory."... Writer begins in 1929, with official portraits of Mussolini which showed him still dressed in civilian clothes... In those years, then, there persisted the first image that Mussolini had wanted to give of himself on seizing power, which was meant to emphasize a certain continuity and the respectability of the man who had restored order... Mentions his unique, for a politician of the times, lack of facial hair... Mussolini’s image in those days was meant to express at the same time modernity, efficiency, and a reassuring continuity, along with authoritarian severity... This aim was certainly intended to counter a previous image, one associated with the period of Fascist lynch squads. Writer dates the period of Mussolini in uniform to a shift in Fascist style around1932, the tenth anniversary of the Fascist revolution... Tells how writer encountered portraits of Mussolini in the "Cubist" style in the early thirties, and mentions that he shaved the rest of the hair from his head-a masterstroke of imagemaking... The classic image of Mussolini was by then established and was not destined to change throughout the peak period of his dictatorship (namely, the better part of the nineteen-thirties). Radio and cinema were the principal media not only for the diffusion of this image but also for its very formation. Describes how in writer’s mind, Mussolini seemed to learn from watching films of his speeches how better to communicate... Once the idea had been planted in people’s heads that a leader must be endowed with an image like his, it was implicit that whoever did not possess that image could not be a leader. For Hitler, who physically was the complete opposite of Mussolini, this must have been an enormous problem, in the period when Mussolini was his model. (The person who understood this with supreme psychological sophistication was Charlie Chaplin, in "The Great Dictator.") Hitler managed to overcome his handicap by going in the opposite direction from Il Duce, emphasizing the nervous agitation of his looks (his face, his mustache, his quiff of hair), and of his voice, and adopting his own style of gestures and rhetoric, which was such as to unleash a fanatical energy that bordered on the hysterical. Along with the uniform, the helmet changed, too: in place of the First World War helmet, evoking, as it did, the poor infantry in the trenches, there was the drooping German-style, dome-shaped helmet, which belonged to a new age of industrial design. ("Aerodynamic" lines in cars come from the same era.) For Mussolini’s iconography, this was a huge shift: the classic image of Il Duce became the one with the helmet, which looked like a metallic extension of the smooth surface of his head. During the war, Mussolini wore the uniform of the Royal Army, campaign dress with forage cap and boots: he had had the Army confer on him the lofty title of Marshal of the Empire. On battlefronts that were still far away, young men a little older than me began to die (those born around 1915, the age group that bore the brunt of the war). Mussolini’s shape, which until a little earlier had tended toward roundness, now began to grow thin, to look haggard and tense... The day was approaching when Il Duce’s portraits, which had multiplied on Italian walls, would be removed from their static position as symbols of the established order and brought out into the open air, into the streets and piazzas, in a tumultuous saraband. This happened on July 25, 1943 (or, to be more precise, a day or two later), when the crowds, which could no longer be kept at bay, invaded the Case del Fascio and flung the effigies of the overthrown dictator out the windows... A month and a half later, we saw the dramatic pictures of a ghostly, ill-shaven Mussolini, who had been snatched from Campo Imperatore by Skorzeny and taken north of the Brenner, back to Hitler. Mussolini was a ghost of himself, yet he had no choice but to continue putting forth his weary image in the midst of aerial bombardment and the rattle of machine guns... Having been at the source of so many unphotographed massacres, Mussolini was last photographed at his own...

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